Talent and the need for it is certainly gaining more attention in the board room but I still see too many companies thinking about it when they need to. Recruiting and managing talent is seen as an unwanted distraction for many!
Surely we all believe that our employees are the single most important resource that we have? We wouldn't have any products, services or the customers that consume them if it wasn't for employees and yet they largely remain at the back end of the queue in respect of any attention from the board.
I have read many articles promoting the idea that CEO's should come from an HR or Talent background and I can see the logic. I really enjoyed a recent article from Harvard describing the 10 year turn around of Volvo to put itself at the forefront of leading the development of "green" vehicles today. This was achieved by placing the Chief People Officer at the centre of their business and making talent THE key part of their strategy. By attracting the best talent around, Volvo have been able to execute a transformation strategy that has touched everything from culture, growth mindset, mechanical engineering bias to a software engineering bias and has ultimately created a new range of vehicles that they can't produce enough of. Here is the link to the article https://hbr.org/2018/03/how-volvo-reinvented-itself-through-hiring
There are no more jobs for life and talented employees have a lot of options other than your business. Fail to appreciate this and you are preparing to fail!
What is the key to the future of your company? Better yet, who is the key to the future of your company, and what are you doing to unleash his or her potential? Most executives today recognize the competitive advantage of talent, yet the talent practices their organizations use are vestiges of another era. They were designed for predictable environments, traditional ways of getting work done, and organizations where lines and boxes defined how people were managed. As work and organizations become more fluid—and business strategy comes to mean sensing and seizing new opportunities in a constantly changing environment, rather than planning for several years into a predictable future—companies must deploy talent in new ways. In fact, talent must lead strategy.
https://www.kornferry.com/institute/the-path-to-high-level-talent?briefings-for-the-boardroom